Member of international dope ring pleads guilty to kidnapping

Ian Duncan, The Baltimore Sun

A member of an alleged international marijuana smuggling organization shipping drugs to Maryland has pleaded guilty to kidnapping a man who was later murdered in the bathroom of a White Marsh apartment.

Jamaican national Dean Myrie, 39, faces life imprisonment for his role in the crime and for being a member of the organization. Myrie and other members of the ring kidnapped Michael Knight, a courier, in December, 2009, federal prosecutors said. They thought he had stolen $250,000 in money he had been holding for Brown, according to filings in the case, bound him up with a telephone cord and interrogated him.

When Knight said he did not know where the money went, prosecutors say a woman named Jean Brown — who allegedly led the organization — paid two other men $100,000 to kill him. She denies the allegations.

He was stabbed to death in the bathtub, prosecutors said, and in the days after the killing, members of the organization allegedly cut up his corpse with power saws.

"His body has never been recovered, though Knight's blood was recovered in the bathroom where he was killed," prosecutors wrote in a recent filing.

Myrie was arrested by the New York Police Department and U.S. Marshals in July, with the help of a tip they got when his story was featured on America's Most Wanted. Christopher Carlos Nieto, his attorney, declined to comment.

Prosecutors allege that Brown's smuggling organization reaped her $1 million a month profit — so much that she plowed money into expensive Jamaican real estate.

"She maintains her innocence and plans to go to trial," Thomas L. Crowe, Brown's attorney, said. She is expected to be tried on racketeering, drug, murder and kidnapping charges in February.